Content about farmer

The farmer said the marker commemorated 198 samurai who were killed at that spot during a war, and the stones were marking their eternal tomb—which we had just turned into our personal playground, oops.

The farmers below said we should not climb that stream because it was thick, BIG jungle filled with restless spirits. We had proceeded anyway, because we wanted to find a shrine that someone had told us was buried deep in the jungle.

The media is starting to recognize the emerging phase of the disaster that struck Japan on March 11, 2011: survivor suicide. The question becomes, what can we do, if anything, to stop the survivor-suicide phase of disaster? A key part of the challenge is to influence change using existing practice and infrastructure within the established culture. That means teaching locals how to administer to one another, not imposing programs, practice, and morals as outsiders.

Some Japanese friends told us a story that is making the rounds through the grapevine about a Fukushima farmer who killed himself when he learned that he had to destroy his crop of radioactive cabbage. This grapevine story appeared in the Los Angeles Times today in a story titled "Japan fears post-quake rise in suicides."